Evidence-making the pandemic: Models, policy and Covid-19 (Hybrid Event)
Professor Tim Rhodes and Associate Professor Kari Lancaster
Department seminar
Friday, 18 November 2022, 2.30pm to 4pm
Hybrid Event: Meeting Room 1, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG OR Via Teams
Hosted by Professor Trish Greenhalgh (PA: charlotte.thompson-grant@phc.ox.ac.uk)
The Covid-19 pandemic is a prompt to new thinking not only about how evidence comes to bear on policy, but also about the nature of the thing we call evidence itself.
The Covid-19 pandemic is a prompt to new thinking not only about how evidence comes to bear on policy, but also about the nature of the thing we call evidence itself. In this seminar, Professor Tim Rhodes (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine & University of New South Wales) and Associate Professor Kari Lancaster (University of New South Wales) discuss research investigating science, evidence, and expertise in the context of Covid-19 undertaken within the Evidence-Making Interventions in Health programme. The seminar focuses on two case studies, examining how evidence has been made, translated, and contested. Together, they explore two key questions: How is evidence made in the face of uncertainty?; and, How does evidence come to be in its situation?
The thing we call evidence: Toward a situated ontology of evidence in policy
The first part of the seminar asks: What does it mean to ‘follow the evidence’? This presentation proposes a critical move towards a situated ontology of evidence in policy, disrupting how evidence has hitherto been characterised as being used for policy. We attend to how the thing we call evidence is enacted in events of policy deliberation, and not merely before it, arguing that evidence translations constitute transformations of evidence into different things. We take as our case for analysis the deliberations surrounding the United Kingdom’s Covid-19 response, including the use of mathematical modelling. Through this analysis we notice how evidence is performed as a thing ‘followed’, emerging as a thoroughly political and public concern, and as ‘evidence-enough’ in the face of uncertainty. Attending to evidence as a situated achievement, a thing made in an event, brings to the fore ethico-political matterings that might ordinarily be obscured.
The uncomfortable science of mathematical models in policy
The second part of the seminar explores the ‘uncomfortable science’ of models in policy. Working with the qualitative interview accounts of 29 mathematical modellers and other scientists engaged in the UK Covid-19 response, we trace how ‘scientific consensus’ is made, as well as troubled, in the face of uncertainty. Our point of departure is a moment of controversy in the public announcement of the second national lockdown in October 2020 in the UK, but we also touch on how models perform in the first national lockdown of March 2020. Inspired by the work of John Law, we follow how ‘evidence’ emerges as a fluid object of its policy situation. We argue that we not only need to see translations of science in policy as messy, but that we need to be thinking altogether differently about the project of ‘evidence-based policy’.
Speakers
Tim Rhodes is Professor of Public Health Sociology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and SHARP Professor of the Sociology of Health at the Centre for Social Research in Health at the University of New South Wales. He is using qualitative methods to explore the social relations of evidence-making practices in health and care, especially in the fields of infectious disease, pandemics, drug use and additions.
Kari Lancaster is Scientia Associate Professor at the Centre for Social Research in Health at the University of New South Wales, and Honorary Associate Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She leads a program of qualitative research focused on the development of critical approaches to the study of evidence-making practices and intervention translations in health. Informed by Science and Technology Studies, Kari is currently investigating viral elimination and outbreak science in the governance of health, and Long Covid care and recovery.
To sign up, please email Charlotte Thompson-Grant, stating if you will be in-person or online (charlotte.thompson-grant@phc.ox.ac.uk)